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Introduction

Learning the characters is one of the most fascinating and fun parts of learning Chinese, and people are often surprised by how much they enjoy being able to recognize them and to write them. Added to that, writing the characters is also the best way of learning them. This book shows you how to write the second 100 most common characters and gives you plenty of space to practice writing them. When you do this, you’ll be learning a writing system which is one of the oldest in the world and is now used by more than a billion people around the globe every day.

In this introduction we’ll talk about:

 how the characters developed;

 the difference between traditional and simplified forms of the characters;

 what the “radicals” are and why they’re useful;

 how to count the writing strokes used to form each character;

 how to look up the characters in a dictionary;

 how words are created by joining two characters together; and, most importantly;

 how to write the characters!

Also, in case you’re using this book on your own without a teacher, we’ll tell you how to get the most out of using it.

Chinese characters are not nearly as strange and complicated as people seem to think. They’re actually no more mysterious than musical notation, which most people can master in only a few months. So there’s really nothing to be scared of or worried about: everyone can learn them—it just requires a bit of patience and perseverance. There are also some things which you may have heard about writing Chinese characters that aren’t true. In particular, you don’t need to use a special brush to write them (a ball-point pen is fine), and you don’t need to be good at drawing (in fact you don’t even need to have neat handwriting, although it helps!).

How many characters are there?

Thousands! You would probably need to know something like two thousand to be able to read Chinese newspapers and books, but you don’t need anything like that number to read a menu, go shopping or read simple street signs and instructions. Just as you can get by in most countries knowing about a hundred words of the local language, so too you can get by in China quite well knowing a hundred common Chinese characters. And this would also be an excellent basis for learning to read and write Chinese.

How did the characters originally develop?

Chinese characters started out as pictures representing simple objects, and the first characters originally resembled the things they represented. For example:

Some other simple characters were pictures of “ideas”:

Some of these characters kept this “pictographic” or “ideographic” quality about them, but others were gradually modified or abbreviated until many of them now look nothing like the original objects or ideas.

Then, as words were needed for things which weren’t easy to draw, existing characters were “combined” to create new characters. For example, 女 (meaning “woman”) combined with 子 (meaning “child”) gives a new character 好 (which means “good” or “to be fond of ”).

Notice that when two characters are joined together like this to form a new character, they get squashed together and deformed slightly. This is so that the new, combined character will fit into the same size square or “box” as each of the original two characters. For example the character 日 “sun” becomes thinner when it is the left-hand part of the character 时 “time”; and it becomes shorter when it is the upper part of the character 星 “star”. Some components got distorted and deformed even more than this in the combining process: for example when the character 人 “man” appears on the left-hand side of a complex character it gets compressed into 亻, like in the character 他 “he”.

So you can see that some of the simpler characters often act as basic “building blocks” from which more complex characters are formed. This means that if you learn how to write these simple characters you’ll also be learning how to write some complex ones too.

How are characters read and pronounced?

The pronunciations in this workbook refer to modern standard Chinese. This is the official language of China and is also known as “Mandarin” or “putonghua”.

The pronunciation of Chinese characters is written out with letters of the alphabet using a romanization system called “Hanyu Pinyin”—or “pinyin” for short. This is the modern system used in China. In pinyin some of the letters have a different sound than in English—but if you are learning Chinese you’ll already know this. We could give a description here of how to pronounce each sound, but it would take up a lot of space—and this workbook is about writing the characters, not pronouncing them! In any case, you really need to hear a teacher (or recording) pronounce the sounds out loud to get an accurate idea of what they sound like.

Each Chinese character is pronounced using only one syllable. However, in addition to the syllable, each character also has a particular tone, which refers to how the pitch of the voice is used. In standard Chinese there are four different tones, and in pinyin the tone is marked by placing an accent mark over the vowel as follows:

The pronunciation of each character is therefore a combination of a syllable and a tone. There are only a small number of available syllables in Chinese, and many characters therefore share the same syllable—in fact many characters share the same sound plus tone combination. They are like the English words “here” and “hear”—when they are spoken, you can only tell which is which from the context or by seeing the word in written form.

Apart from putonghua (modern standard Chinese), another well-known type of Chinese is Cantonese, which is spoken in southern China and in many Chinese communities around the world. In fact there are several dozen different Chinese languages, and the pronunciations of Chinese characters in these languages are all very different from each other. But the important thing to realize is that the characters themselves do not change. So two Chinese people who can’t understand each other when they’re talking together, can write to one another without any problem at all!

Simplified and traditional characters

As more and more characters were introduced over the years by combining existing characters, some of them became quite complicated. Writing them required many strokes which was time-consuming, and it became difficult to distinguish some of them, especially when the writing was small. So when writing the characters quickly in handwritten form, many people developed short-cuts and wrote them in a more simplified form. In the middle of the 20^th century, the Chinese decided to create a standardised set of simplified characters to be used by everyone in China. This resulted in many of the more complicated characters being given simplified forms, making them much easier to learn and to write. Today in China, and also in Singapore, these simplified characters are used almost exclusively, and many Chinese no longer learn the old traditional forms. However the full traditional forms continue to be used in Taiwan and in overseas Chinese communities around the world.

Here are some examples of how some characters were simplified:

Modern standard Chinese uses only simplified characters. But it is useful to be able to recognize the traditional forms as they are still used in many places outside China, and of course older books and inscriptions were also written using the traditional forms. This workbook teaches the full simplified forms. If there is a traditional form, then it is shown in a separate box on the right-hand side of the page so that you can see what it looks like. Where there is no traditional form, the character was considered simple enough already and was left unchanged.

How is Chinese written?

Chinese was traditionally written from top to bottom in columns beginning on the right-hand side of the page and working towards the left, like this:

This means that for a book printed in this way, you start by opening it at (what Westerners would think of as) the back cover. While writing in columns is sometimes considered archaic, you will still find many books, especially novels and more serious works of history, printed in this way.

Nowadays, though, most Chinese people write from left to right in horizontal lines working from the top of a page to the bottom, just as we do in English.

Are Chinese characters the same as English words?

Although each character has a meaning, it’s not really true that an individual character is equivalent to an English “word”. Each character is actually only a single syllable. In Chinese (like in English) some words are just one syllable, but most words are made up of two or more syllables joined together. The vast majority of words in Chinese actually consist of two separate characters placed together in a pair. These multi-syllable words are often referred to as “compounds”, and this workbook provides a list of common compounds for each character.

Some Chinese characters are one-syllable words on their own (like the English words “if” and “you”), while other characters are only ever used as one half of a word (like the English syllables “sen” and “tence”). Some characters do both: they’re like the English “light” which is happy as a word on its own, but which also links up to form words like “headlight” or “lighthouse”.

The Chinese write sentences by stringing characters together in a long line from left to right (or in a column from top to bottom), with equal-sized spaces between each character. If English were written this way—as individual syllables rather than as words that are joined together—it would mean all the syllables would be written separately with spaces in between them, something like this:

If you can un der stand this sen tence you can read Chi nese too.

So in theory, you can’t see which characters are paired together to form words, but in practice, once you know a bit of Chinese, you can!

Punctuation was not traditionally used when writing Chinese, but today commas, periods (full stops), quotation marks, and exclamation points are all used along with other types of punctuation which have been borrowed from English.

Two ways of putting characters together

We have looked at combining characters together to make new characters, and pairing characters together to make words. So what’s the difference?

Well, when two simple characters are combined to form a new complex character, they are squashed or distorted so that the new character fits into the same size square as the original characters. The meaning of the new character may be related to the meaning of its components, but it frequently appears to have no connection with them at all! The new complex character also has a new single-syllable pronunciation, which may or may not be related to the pronunciation of one of its parts. For example:

On the other hand, when characters are paired together to create words, the characters are simply written one after the other, normal sized, with a normal space in between (and there are no hyphens or anything to show that these characters are working together as a pair). The resulting word has a pronunciation which is two syllables—it is simply the pronunciations of the two individual characters one after the other. Also, you’re much more likely to be able to guess the meaning of the word from the meanings of the individual characters that make it up. For example:

Is it necessary to learn words as well as characters?

As we’ve said, the meaning of a compound word is often related to the meanings of the individual characters. But this is not always the case, and sometimes the word takes on a new and very specific meaning. So to be able to read Chinese sentences and understand what they mean, it isn’t enough just to learn individual character—you’ll also need to learn words. (In fact, many individual characters have very little meaning at all by themselves, and only take on meanings when paired with other characters).

Here are some examples of common Chinese words where the meaning of the overall word is not what you might expect from the meanings of the individual characters:

If you think about it, the same thing happens in English. If you know what “battle” and “ship” mean, you can probably guess what a “battleship” might be. But this wouldn’t work with “championship”! Similarly, you’d be unlikely to guess the meaning of “honeymoon” if you only knew the words “honey” and “moon”.

The good news is that learning compound words can help you to learn the characters. For example, you may know (from your Chinese lessons) that xīng qī means “week”. So when you see that this word is written 星期, you will know that 星 is pronounced xīng, and 期 is pronounced qī —even when these characters are forming part of other words. In fact, you will find that you remember many characters as half of some familiar word.

When you see a word written in characters, you can also often see how the word came to mean what it does. For example, xīng qī is 星期 which literally means “star period”. This will help you to remember both the word and the two individual characters.

What is a stroke count?

Each Chinese character is made up of a number of pen or brush strokes. Each individual stroke is the mark made by a pen or brush before lifting it off the paper to write the next stroke. Strokes come in various shapes and sizes—a stroke can be a straight line, a curve, a bent line, a line with a hook, or a dot. There is a traditional and very specific way that every character should be written. The order and direction of the strokes are both important if the character is to have the correct appearance.

What counts as a stroke is determined by tradition and is not always obvious. For example, the small box that often appears as part of a character (like the one on page 32, in the character 名) counts as three strokes, not four! (This is because a single stroke is traditionally used to write the top and right-hand sides of the box).

All this may sound rather pedantic but it is well worth learning how to write the characters correctly and with the correct number of strokes. One reason is that knowing how to count the strokes correctly is useful for looking up characters in dictionaries, as you’ll see later.

This book shows you how to write characters stroke by stroke, and once you get the feel of it you’ll very quickly learn how to work out the stroke count of a character you haven’t met before, and get it right!

What are radicals?

Although the earliest characters were simple drawings, most characters are complex with two or more parts. And you’ll find that some simple characters appear over and over again as parts of many complex characters. Have a look at these five characters:

All five of these characters have the same component on the left-hand side: 女, which means “woman”. This component gives a clue to the meaning of the character, and is called the “radical”. As you can see, most of these five characters have something to do with the idea of “woman”, but as you can also see, it’s not a totally reliable way of guessing the meaning of a character. (Meanings of characters are something you just have to learn, without much help from their component parts).

Unfortunately the radical isn’t always on the left-hand side of a character. Sometimes it’s on the right, or on the top, or on the bottom. Here are some examples: